Page 42 - The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts

Some researchers, among them psychiatrist M. Scott
Peck and psychologist Dorothy Tennov, have concluded
that the in-love experience should not be called “love” at all.
Dr. Tennov coined the word limerance for the in-love
experience in order to distinguish that experience from
what she considers real love. Dr. Peck concludes that the
falling-in-love experience is not real love for three reasons.
First, falling in love is not an act of the will or a conscious
choice. No matter how much we may want to fall in love, we
cannot make it happen. On the other hand, we may not be
seeking the experience when it overtakes us. Often, we fall
in love at inopportune times and with unlikely people.
Second, falling in love is not real love because it is
effortless. Whatever we do in the in-love state requires little
discipline or conscious effort on our part. The long,
expensive phone calls we make to each other, the money
we spend traveling to see each other, the gifts we give, the
work projects we do are as nothing to us. As the instinctual
nature of the bird dictates the building of a nest, so the
instinctual nature of the in-love experience pushes us to do
outlandish and unnatural things for each other.
Third, one who is “in love” is not genuinely interested in
fostering the personal growth of the other person. “If we
have any purpose in mind when we fall in love it is to
terminate our own loneliness and perhaps ensure this result
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through marriage.” The in-love experience does not focus
on our own growth nor on the growth and development of